This argument is core to the thesis advanced by David Brion Davis in his The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution.

It's a highly influential work. Davis argues that antislavery developed in different ways in different countries due to distinct national values and the differences between the various groups that supported abolition. To explore this idea, he compares slavery and antislavery in Britain, America, and France.

Davis’s most influential ideas relate to the British antislavery movement. He argues that abolition served the needs of Britain’s governing elite.

Davis believed that the rise of the antislavery movement was intimately linked to the development of the economic system of capitalism, in which things such as land, technology, and resources are held in private hands, and which brought with it new forms of oppression, such as worker exploitation, child labor, and poverty. Davis argues that the crusade to end slavery in the British Empire diverted attention away from the harsh conditions of capitalism.

He concludes that antislavery served the class interest of the British elite. As a result, the British elite supported it.

The situation in America was different. Americans emphasized the concepts of liberty and equality for all. There were strong abolitionist movements in the North and South of the country, but despite America’s revolutionary ideals, the ruling classes fiercely resisted abolishing slavery.

The French experience was different again, he says. In France, slaves had been emancipated during the French Revolution. But they were re-enslaved by Napoleon and did not regain their freedom for another half-century.

To understand why Davis's points were important, it can help to review some of the earlier historiography in this area. In 1944, the historian Eric Williams, who was also the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, had made a major contribution to the debate on these subjects by publishing his book Capitalism and Slavery. In it he argued that economic considerations had led to Britain ending slavery in its Caribbean colonies. Previous scholars had attributed this action to the social struggles of abolitionists, but Williams argued that it was due to economic decline in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Coupled with the rising power of industrial capitalists in Britain, this prompted a shift in the country’s economic strategy, with slavery coming to be seen as an inefficient system.

However, many historians, including Davis, viewed this account as being too simplistic. Davis himself pointed to evidence that suggested that the Caribbean slave colonies were not in decline. But he also argued that it was important to account for the broader economic context in which slavery was abolished, rather than giving all the credit to the progressive ideals of abolitionists.

So Davis was not the first historian to explore the relationship between the rise of capitalism and the development of mass antislavery movements. Many other historians had also argued that these developments were somehow linked. But Davis’s approach to the question was quite novel.

He started by outlining the long history of the acceptance of slavery in the West. In showing that slavery dated back to ancient times, the author demonstrates why the emergence of the antislavery movement is so puzzling. Both Britain and America were heavily involved in the slave trade, and it was a practice that was deeply embedded in the psychology and social structures of these societies. This, said Davis, made them unlikely locations for antislavery movements to arise among their people.

The success of the antislavery movement in Britain seems particularly puzzling. In Britain during the period in question (1770–1823), economic and political elites were hostile to the idea of social change. That hostility hardened in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Also in Britain, moreover, many social evils were associated with the Industrial Revolution, when labor was mechanised on a large scale, changing the economy and society in very widespread and significant ways. It is not clear why the change in moral perception produced such an intense focus on slavery, rather than on other issues.

Davis offers answers to these questions by looking at how the ideology of antislavery intersected with the ideas and needs of an emerging capitalist class. He argues that taking a stance against free labor (slavery) helped to protect and cement the interests of capitalism during a time of great social and political change.

Davis points out the paradox that existed: while there were calls to rid the world of one form of oppression—slavery—another form, low-wage factory labor, was being introduced.

Antislavery provided the emerging commercial and industrial class with moral authority. At a time of great political and social opposition, it gave them a much-needed image of being benevolent and progressive. It allowed them to present the wage economy, however exploitative it was and however low the wages were, as a modern and acceptable form of labor simply because it was preferable to slavery.

This is the most significant idea in the book. Davis points out that antislavery advocates did not set out to benefit capitalism as a deliberate point of strategy, but, as he notes, “the ideological meaning of a reform is something more than the sum of the reformers’ motives and intentions.”

Antislavery, according to Davis, quickly came to reflect “the ideological needs of various groups and classes.” This is a contentious idea. These “groups” included the Quakers, who, as well as being central to the antislavery movement, were heavily involved in commerce and industry; as such, they were part of the capitalist elite whose needs were served by abolition.

Overall, then, Davis argued that although antislavery thought emerged from the thinking of secular philosophers of the Enlightenment and from that of the nonconformist Christian movement known as the Quakers, their ideas served the interests of the emerging capitalist class. As a result, antislavery thought helped to establish the hegemony of this capitalist class and to legitimise wage labor (by which he meant the practice of working long hours—as many as 16 to 18 hours a day—in exchange for very low pay).

Different scholars have criticised this representation of hegemony. The American historian Seymour Drescher argues that Davis sees antislavery as a “screening device” that acted to deflect concern over domestic problems. In fact, Drescher argues, the antislavery movement was generated from below. It then fed into a host of other radical causes in the nineteenth century.

Another American historian, Thomas Haskell, argues that Davis’s account is incoherent. Davis claims that antislavery advocates were genuine in their stated principles and did not “intend” to strengthen class hegemony. But Haskell is explicit in stating that this is not a valid line of argument: “To say a person is moved by class interest is to say that he intends to further the interests of his class, or it is to say nothing at all.”

Overall, we can say that Davis’s concept of self-deception—where people convince themselves the consequences of their actions will be different from what they are—is very difficult to prove. This is particularly true when reconstructing historical acts, as we surely cannot claim with any degree of certainty to understand the psychological motives behind them.